Welcome to Hyperion Records, an independent British classical label devoted to presenting high-quality recordings of music of all styles and from all periods from the twelfth century to the twenty-first.

Hyperion offers both CDs, and downloads in a number of formats. The site is also available in several languages.

Please use the dropdown buttons to set your preferred options, or use the checkbox to accept the defaults.

Other recordings available for download

Reviews

'This performance of the E minor Concerto is splendid in many ways. The OAE, with its period instruments, delivers textures of unusual transparency and Alina Ibragimova's playing combines verve, brilliance and imaginative intelligence' (Gramophone)

'Ibragimova's sensitive playing wins the day, with some superlative quiet moments and at all times a loyal adherence to the composer's markings and a sure sense of the music's phrasing and architecture' (BBC Music Magazine)

'Alina Ibragimova, with her wonderfully full, malleable tone, sinewy agility and deft expressiveness, proves a compelling exponent of this brilliant teenage score, combining it on this disc with an equally ear-catching performance of the later E minor Concerto … the speed of the finale might spell disaster in less able hands, but here it is simply thrilling' (The Daily Telegraph)

'Ibragimova's subtle changes of colour and prodigious range of articulation are things to wonder at' (The Guardian)

'This version of the E minor concerto is fresh and distinctive … the OAE's characterful playing is much in evidence … urged on by Vladimir Jurowski, supporting a feisty Alina Ibragimova, who has the appassionato marking of the first movement firmly in view but avoids ruthlessness and finds time to reflect … the 'other' violin concerto, the D minor, may not be as evergreen or as instantly memorable, but it is precocious and utterly assured … the catchy finale … leaves no doubt as to Ibragimova's virtuosity and the rapport between her and Jurowski and the OAE' (International Record Review)

Introduction

On 22 July 1829, a twenty-year-old German composer departed London on a northern itinerary bound for Scotland. The English concert season had just concluded, and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809–1847), having made a successful debut at the Philharmonic, left London musical life and society to pursue a novel pastime—a walking tour of Scotland during which he planned to ‘rake together’ folksongs. Accompanying him was his friend Karl Klingemann, a staff member of the Hanoverian legation. By the end of the month the two had reached Edinburgh, where one of Mendelssohn’s first efforts was to climb Arthur’s Seat. Taking in sweeping views of the Firth of Forth and the distant outlines of Ben Lomond, he wrote to his family in Berlin: ‘When God in heaven takes up panorama painting, you can expect something terrific.’ At Holyrood Palace, Mendelssohn contemplated the tragic reign of Mary, Queen of Scots, and in the adjacent, mouldering abbey, roofless and succumbing to the measured advance of ivy, he found the haunting melancholy that would tinge the opening of his Scottish Symphony. With Klingemann he then made an excursion south to the Borders region to visit Abbotsford. Filled with artefacts of Scottish history, this recently constructed residence was inhabited by the ‘great wizard of the North’, Sir Walter Scott, author of the epic poem The Lady of the Lake (1810) and the anonymously published Waverley novels (which began to appear in 1814), then all the rage on the Continent in translations. But the travellers enjoyed only a brief conversation with the celebrity, whose interests in German music were not deep. During their return trip to Edinburgh they paused to visit the thirteenth-century Cistercian abbey at Melrose, where Mendelssohn sketched some of the red sandstone gargoyles (whether or not he rendered one of the most fanciful, of a pig playing a bagpipe, is unknown).

Proceeding across the Highlands, the tourists reached Oban on the western coast. There, on 7 August, Mendelssohn sketched Dunollie Castle, the thirteenth-century stronghold of the MacDougalls, who had fought against Robert the Bruce. The ruins of their castle looked out from a promontory onto Mull and some of the surrounding Hebridean islands. Later that day Mendelssohn and Klingemann boarded a steamer to the fishing village of Tobermory, on the northern coast of Mull, and that evening the composer gathered his impressions in another letter to Berlin: ‘In order to make you understand how extraordinarily the Hebrides affected me, the following came into my mind there.’ The ‘following’ was a musical sketch, in piano score but with detailed orchestral cues, of the opening of the overture The Hebrides, also known as the Fingal’s Cave overture, in nearly its finished form. Here we find the familiar, rocking bass motif, sequentially transposed in a rising pattern, with sustained wind chords in the treble. Transposing visual memories of the day into sounding images, Mendelssohn indulged in synaesthesia, so that sight became sound in a finely nuanced display of romantic tone painting.

Significantly, his original musical inspiration for the overture was triggered by his visual impressions from Oban, not by his celebrated visit to Fingal’s Cave, on the tiny, windswept island of Staffa, six miles off the western coast of Mull. That event occurred the following day, 8 August. The seas were gentle enough for the tourists to land and clamber into the cave, but not calm enough for Mendelssohn to jot down further musical impressions, or to climb atop the island, as the poet Keats had in 1818. Succumbing to queasiness, Mendelssohn deferred to Klingemann, who sent this description to Berlin: ‘Staffa, with its strange basalt pillars and caverns, is in all the picture books. We were put out in boats and lifted by the hissing sea up the pillar stumps to the famous Fingal’s Cave. A greener roar of waves never rushed into a stranger cavern—its many pillars making it look like the inside of an immense organ, black and resounding, absolutely without purpose, and quite alone, the wide grey sea within and without.’

Not until December 1830 was Mendelssohn able to date a finished score of the overture, and he did so in Rome, well removed from nebulous Scottish seascapes. But, as was the case with most of his major works, the overture fell victim to the composer’s Revisionskrankheit, and he laboured over retouching the music for the next few years. With each reworking, Mendelssohn changed the title, first to Ouvertüre zur einsamen Insel (Overture to the Solitary Island), then to The Isles of Fingal for the first English performance in 1832, before finally releasing the work in print in 1835 as Fingals Höhle (Fingal’s Cave). An early performance in Leipzig was announced as Ossian in Fingals Höhle, linking the music and Staffa to one of the great literary forgeries of all time—the Ossianic poems passed off by James MacPherson in the 1760s as authentic fragments of ancient Celtic poetry.

Like all great music, Mendelssohn’s overture admits multiple interpretations. One can hear it in purely musical terms as an understated movement in modified sonata form, with three climaxes positioned near the end of the exposition, end of the development, and in the coda. In programmatic terms, one can interpret the overture as a musical depiction of Scottish seascapes and landscapes, or perhaps reflecting Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, partially set on Ellen’s Island, a ‘solitary’ island in Loch Katrine in the Trossachs. Or, shifting to Fingal’s Cave, one can imagine the distant military exploits of Fingal, as depicted in the Ossianic poems, an allusion that might well explain the military fanfares in the brass and winds that briefly come to the fore in the overture.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in vibrant performances of Mendelssohn's Symphony No 3 (the 'Scottish') and Schumann's Piano Concerto. Maria João Pires is the piano soloist.» More